Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales

Alexander Hammond

Washington State University

In planning an edition of Poe’s 1833 Folio Club collection, I have found modifications to my “Preliminary Notes” on
this matter necessary (1). My purpose here is to examine more fully an issue posed by the late publication date of “Raising the
Wind; or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” to alter my argument about the status of “Loss of Breath. A
Tale a la Blackwood” in the framework, to report new information bearing on the relationship of “Slope — A
Fable” and “King Pest the First” to their Folio Club authors, and to suggest perspectives for future critical studies
of the Folio Club stories as a group.

I

In 1969, Burton R. Pollin advanced a list of reasons for rejecting Claude Richard’s identification of “Raising the Wind;
or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” as Mr. Snap’s story in the Folio Club framework (2). Pollin’s
last point — “The failure of the poverty-stricken Poe ever to retain for years or months a publishable piece” —
still raises a relevant question about my own version of Richard’s case: why would Poe delay until 1843 the sale of a story
composed prior to May 1833? Contrary to Pollin’s assertion, however, several of the Folio Club tales were retained “for
years” before appearing in print, and one such story, I would argue, must have been Mr. Snap’s.

The eleven-story Folio Club collection was completed by the spring of 1833; separate printings of a number of its tales (“Slope
— A Fable,” “King Pest the First,” “Epimanes,” and “Lionizing” are examples) were
postponed two years or more while Poe patiently waited for Carey, Lea, & Blanchard to issue the volume as a whole (3). But even
after May 1835, when the contents of this collection began appearing regularly in the Southern Literary Messenger, two of its
tales were still withheld from publication. Poe sold a total of fourteen short stories to the Messenger in this period, the last
printed in its April 1836 number. Because these fourteen titles include reprinted forms of all the author’s previously published
fiction, and because his editorial position on the magazine lasted through the end of 1836, we know Poe chose not to sell two tales
definitely in his files in August 1835 when he announced a sixteen-story Folio Club collection and still there, together with another,
perhaps newly written piece, in September 1836 when he projected a seventeen-story version of this work.4 One of these three stories was
obviously “Slope — A Fable,” part of the manuscript remains from the 1833 collection; another must have been Mr.
Snap’s tale, for none of the Messenger stories seems even marginally appropriate for this caricature of John Neal to
deliver in the Folio Club symposium. During 1837 Poe published only two tales other than the aborted installments of The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym: “Slope A Fable” and “don Jung, the Mystic” (“Mystification”). While the
latter could well be the third story in question here, it too is inappropriate for Mr. Snap, as are Poe’s tales of 1838, when
[column 2:] the appearance of “Ligeia” finally brings the total of his published short stories to seventeen.
Whatever its title, Mr. Snap’s story is thus an anomaly in Poe’s canon, a Folio Club tale which was not printed in the
Messenger and which remained unsold even during what must have been the financially lean years immediately following his
abandonment of the symposium framework.

The obvious weakness of “Raising the Wind” in isolation from that framework (Pollin justly calls it a
“potboiler”) is consistent with the above evidence. Early in his career, the author could well have found this story
difficult to sell, and certainly it would be an unlikely if not embarrassing piece for Poe as editor to print in the Messenger,
in Graham’s, or even in Burton’s unless particularly desperate for material. While we can only speculate about
the reasons why the story would be resurrected in 1843, Poe’s precarious financial situation at that time seems more than
sufficient cause (5). He must have seen in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier an opportunity to realize ready cash from his old
Folio Club story, for “Raising the Wind” was submitted to that newspaper shortly after its undoubtedly profitable
serialization of his 1843 prize tale “The Gold Bug.” Pollin notes that Kenney’s farce “Raising the Wind”
was first performed that year in Philadelphia on 9 September and suggests “this probably led to [Poe’s] quickly penning the
narrative essay for rapid publication by the . . . Courier in October.” But a recently published letter shows the
newspaper had possession of the manuscript by 26 August 1843. In it Poe asks the Courier’s editor to advance to Mrs. Clemm
payment for an “article” under consideration, prefacing the request by claiming to have left town for business in Richmond,
thereby stranding his family for three weeks without funds. A postscript states he had recently received twenty dollars for “The
Black Cat,” adding “the article you have is worth as much — being longer &, I think, better [sic].”
Poe is indulging here in emotional blackmail if not a rather desperate “diddle” (6), a sadly appropriate means for selling
this particular story. The case for linking “Raising the Wind” to Mr. Snap must rest upon internal evidence, but the
assumption that Poe withheld the tale from publication for ten years is not inconsistent with either the textual history of the Folio
Club collection or the available facts about the story’s publication in the Courier.

II

In suggesting that only a section of “Loss of Breath” (1835) was included in Poe’s collection, I argued that the
satiric, bantering tone of much of this story was inappropriate for Mr. Blackwood Blackwood, whose contribution should imitate rather
than overtly parody the standard Blackwood’s “article,” typically a tale of pseudo-scientific terror. The basic
assumption here I think still valid: Poe’s narrative structure dictates that the tales be plausible, if highly mannered, examples
of the literary styles implied by the club members’ type-names and descriptions. But the view of Blackwood’s fiction
in this argument is arbitrarily narrow. As Michael Allen documents, the magazine actually featured three general kinds of fiction:
burlesques; tales of sensation; and stories of working-class criminals (7). Whether or not the brief appearance of the mail-robber W
——— constitutes an allusion to the third category [page 39:]
here, “Loss of Breath” as a whole reads like a composite of the first two types of story — in effect, “Le
Revenant” or “The Diary of a Late Physician” as they might have been written by an author like Robert Macnish (8). The
revisions that created this tale from “A Decided Loss” (1832) suggest a deliberate attempt to emphasize this composite
quality, for Poe added not only an account of the hero’s sensations (the gallows scene and immediate aftermath) characteristic of
Blackwood’s tales of terror but also a comic encounter with a grotesque (the scene with Windenough in the tomb) recalling
the subject and manner of the magazine’s burlesque pieces — particularly of tales like “The Man with the Nose”
(August 1826), “Man with the Mouth” (May 1828), and “The Man Mountain” (March 1829), all by Macnish. Because the
resulting story takes the reader on a tour of the bizarre landscape of Blackwood’s fiction generally, it probably did
serve, even though closer to explicit parody than any other Folio Club story except “Lionizing,” as Mr. Blackwood
Blackwood’s tale.

Internal evidence also suggests Poe revised the tale with this club member’s role in mind. In its 1835 form “Loss of
Breath” features the parallel experiences of two inverse doubles (9), the short, “corpulent,” breathless narrator of
“A Decided Loss” and a new figure, his “lath-like antagonist Windenough, cursed with a “superfluity of
breath.” When this tale is read as Mr. Blackwood Blackwood’s, its plot allegorically explains his doubled name as well as
the role of Windenough, who has long been recognized as a caricature of John Wilson, Blackwood’s editor and chief critic
(10). The story’s narrator Lacko’breath mutely suffers through a sequence of outlandish experiences typical of
Blackwood’s fiction, the last of which involves a confrontation with its wordy editor in a tomb. The editor is rescued
from his moribund condition, comically brought on by excessive “windiness,” when he agrees to share his extra
“respiration” with Lacko’breath, implicitly providing the latter with the means of telling (that is, publishing) the
story of his adventures. The “united strength” of their “resuscitated voices” produces “subterranean
noises” much noticed and debated in the press, consequently saving both characters from oblivion. Poe’s additions thus
create a relatively transparent allegory attributing Blackwood’s journalistic success to its tales, or rather to its
combination of “noises” from a typical protagonist of its fiction and from Wilson, presumably in his role as critic and
editor Christopher North (11). This allegory is recapitulated in Mr. Blackwood Blackwood’s implied authorial relationship to this
tale. If this character represents, as his name suggests, the double “voice” of Blackwood’s journalism, then
half of this voice narrates a retrospective story about joining with its complement, a union creating, as it were, the whole Mr.
Blackwood Blackwood. In the Folio Club framework, the narrative structure of “Loss of Breath” thus foreshadows that of a
later, more fully developed double tale, “William Wilson.”

Poe’s literary game here may have another twist. The compact between Windenough and Lacko’breath involves a mysterious
third party, unnamed because the narrator does not wish “at this moment” to incur his “resentment.” This
underground collaborator is probably the devil,12 who sups with the Folio Club, thus listening to “Loss of Breath” at the
“moment”-it is read, and who also appears in various [column 2:] guises in other tales contributed to the symposium:
“Bon-Bon” (the devil’s own story), “Slope — A Fable,” “The Duc de L’Omelette,” and
perhaps “Metzengerstein” and “King Pest the First,” if only by allusion (13). The implication that the devil had
a hand in Blackwood’s success seems consistent with the introduction to the 1833 collection, the narrator of which damns
the Folio Club as a “diabolical association” plotting to “abolish Literature, subvert the Press, and overturn the
Government of Nouns and Pronouns.” Lacking the burlesque criticism from Poe’s framework, however, we can only speculate
about such traces of the devil’s masquerade in its design.

III

The same limitation hampers full explanation of the masquerades played by the “very little man in a black coat with very black
eyes” and the “stout gentleman who admired Sir Walter Scott,” those Folio Club members who contribute “Slope
— A Fable” and “King Pest the First” respectively. Evidently Poe expected the former to be recognized as a type
of the mysterious stranger, an avatar of the nameless “man in black” (an intimate with a club of authors) who befriends the
Chinese philosopher in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (14) and who then reappears as the title character of “The
Little Man in Black” in Paulding’s and the Irving brothers’ Salmagundi (15). Poe seems to effect another turn
of the screw in this sequence by making his character “very little” with “very black eyes.” The
point of this literary game? Perhaps a sly nomination of Tales of the Folio Club as worthy successor to these well-known satires.
However that may be, such allusions are not inconsistent with the probability that Poe’s mysterious stranger represents the author
himself. The “man in black” in Citizen of the World serves an analogous function by representing Goldsmith as a
character in his own fiction. More significantly, the suffering of Salmagundi’s “little man in black,” a
sensitive, misunderstood outsider who eventually starves to death from community neglect, suggests Poe chose this mask to evoke a
sardonic correlative for his own plight during the early 1830’s, if only as a painful private joke (16).

With the “stout gentleman who admired Sir Walter Scott,” Poe was apparently alluding to a quizzing exchange between Scott
and Irving concerning “The Stout Gentleman,” a story the latter author published in Bracebridge Hall in 1822. During
that year, Scott had twice appeared as the still-incognito “Author of Waverley” in comic prefaces to The Fortunes of
Nigel and Peveril of the Peak; in the second of these prefaces, ostensibly letters between the novels’ respective
editors, the Reverend Dr. Dryasdust reports a visit from the anonymous writer (if only in a dream), describes him as a tall, bulky,
large-nosed man dressed for travel in boots, great coat, and suit of snuff-brown, and then adds, “It struck me forcibly, as I
gazed on this portly person, that he realized, in my imagination, the Stout Gentleman in No. II [sic], who afforded such subject
of varying speculation to our most amusing and elegant Utopian traveller, Master Geoffrey Crayon.” Scott thus glosses
Irving’s anticlimactic tale as an episode in the popular game of guessing the identity of the “Author of Waverley,”
amusingly supplying in the process a full view of “the stout gentleman in No. 13” of whom Irving’s narrator [page 40:] could only report a single glimpse, and that the broad bottom of his
“drab breeches.” Irving takes up the joke in Tales of a Traveller (1824), where Geoffrey Crayon observes that not he
but his friend the nervous gentleman unwittingly enjoyed the honor of sharing an inn with “The Great Unknown.” The
announcement of the stout gentleman’s identity has made Crayon’s friend a lion among local bluestockings but also “ten
times more nervous”; furthermore, his renewed efforts to locate the great man’s “portly personage” have failed
because “the features he had caught a glimpse of seem common to the whole race of stout gentleman.”

That Poe draws upon this exchange seems certain, for Dryasdust’s portly visitor drinks deeply and rehearses defenses of his
historical novels in preparation for assuming membership in the Roxburgh Club, a literary society of “unerring judges of old wine
and old books . . . to whom, in the capacity of skilful antiquaries, the investigation of truth is an especial duty.”
The Folio Club, of course, is also a body of critics whose dinner menus include, as it were, both wine and manuscripts (at its meetings
a “superior morceau “ is selected from among the members’ contributions),l7 but the implications of this
correspondence for the 1833 framework are by no means obvious. If Poe’s stout gentleman is identified as Scott himself, then his
description becomes redundant and violates the pattern established for other Folio Club members — for example, “Mr.
Rouge-et-Noir who admired Lady Morgan” cannot be, on the basis of his sex alone, the author whom he admires. As I have noted
elsewhere, Irving may be described as a “stout gentleman who admired Sir Walter Scott.” And certainly “King Pest the
First” seems to illustrate more plausibly how Irving might adapt Scott’s manner in the historical romance than Scott’s
manner per se (18). Because Scott died in 1832, by coincidence the year of Irving’s much celebrated return to America, Poe may be
offering his reader a comic image of an Irving who has assumed the physical appearance as well as the literary manner of his late
friend, or perhaps ever a reincarnation of “The Great Unknown” in the person of the American writer.

However Poe may have developed such options, clearly the stout gentleman’s bloodlines include Irving and Scott but not, insofar
as I can determine, Benjamin Disraeli. I stress the point because several critics have argued “King Pest the First”
functions in the Folio Club context as a parody of the “Palace of Wines” episode in Disraeli’s Vivian
Grey.’9 The claim is dubious on its face because the episode in question is, if anything, even more broadly comic and
satiric than Poe’s own adaptation of it. Furthermore, there is no substantial evidence that Poe expected his reader to recognize
the impact of Vivian Grey on this story: certainly such knowledge seems irrelevant to perceiving the tale’s political
implications, its thematic relationship to the symposium framework, or its appropriateness for the stout gentleman. Lambert Wilmer
recalls of Poe that “among prose writers, Ben. D’Israeli was his model” during the early 1830’s, testimony amply
supported by the many echoes of that author’s novels in the Folio Club collection.20 The Disraeli borrowing in “King Pest
the First” is analogous to Poe’s use of The Young Duke in “The Duc de L’Omelette” or of
Bulwer’s “Too Handsome for Anything” in “Lionizing”: in each instance, we have a source, not a target for
parody.

IV

As these notes indicate, much work remains to be done before Poe’s 1833 experiment and its place in his art will be adequately
understood. The textual history of the Folio Club project, which I have examined at length elsewhere, strongly implies that Poe began
writing fiction with a sequence of stories designed for some form of the symposium framework rather than for separate publication; that
the 1833 collection is the product of an evolution in which “The Bargain Lost” and “A Decided Loss” underwent
major changes and “Epimanes” replaced “A Tale of Jerusalem”; that among the early tales composed after 1833
certainly “Berenice,” “Morella,” and “Hans Phaall” were conceived independently of the Folio Club
design while the eleven-story collection was awaiting publication by Carey, Lea, & Blanchard; and that the sixteen- and
seventeen-story versions of this work existed primarily as never-completed proposals to publishers (21). These findings suggest that the
term “Folio Club tale” is best limited to stories known to have been included in the 1833 collection or some earlier stage
thereof and that the framework of this same collection is a necessary context for understanding the relevant early states of its eleven
stories. We very much need, I think, additional critical studies of individual Folio Club stories based on the latter conclusion.

G. R. Thompson’s reading of “Metzengerstein” offers a useful model for studies of the satiric strategies of these
tales: by recognizing that the narrator in this story represents the voice of a character in the 1833 framework, Thompson is able to
show how this persona’s handling of his story materials constitutes a satiric commentary on its Folio Club author and on the
literary mode in which he writes (22). Similarly close attention to the narrative structure of other Folio Club tales would prevent, I
think, reductive readings of them as simple parodies of their sources, a characteristic that flaws James Southall Wilson’s
“The Devil Was In It” (23). Poe’s use of sources in the collection is hardly this straightforward: the tale
contributed by the caricature of N. P. Willis, for example, represents not Willis’ manner per se but rather the kind of story he
might write if imitating yet another author, Lady Morgan. And Poe’s descriptions of his project, after all, avoid the transfer of
the term “burlesque” from the dub members’ criticism to their tales, which he variously labels original, arabesque,
bizarre and whimsical, even racy. While “most” of Poe’s early stories and implicitly all of the Folio Club tales are
“intended for half-banter, half-satire,” only “Lionizing” and “Loss of Breath” are singled
out by Poe as “satires properly speaking” (24). Clearly Poe thought of his Folio Club tales as relatively complex artifacts,
difficult even for him to categorize. Studies of particular tales should analyze them first, I think, as the expressions of
individualized characters within a larger story, second as literary imitations with comic and satiric implications (25). Even in
“Lionizing” and “Loss of Breath,” the two tales in this collection closest to obvious parodies of their
extrinsic sources, Poe maintains the proprieties of his frame story, keeping intact the masks of the characters who narrate the tales by
not allowing them to grow self-conscious of their compositions as satires per se.

When Poe proposed a seventeen-story version of the Folio Club collection to Harrison Hall of Philadelphia, [page 41:] he described the tales in it as follows: “They are of a bizarre and generally
whimsical character, and were originally written to illustrate a large work ‘On the Imaginative Faculties.’” While the
tide Poe gives this “large work” was almost certainly the creation of the moment, it does suggest a particularly fruitful
perspective on his 1833 collection that complements interpretation of the work as a satiric anatomy of contemporary fiction. Poe’s
framework presents stories that are by definition illustrations of the creative faculties of their authors. It sandwiches these stories,
which we must see as artifacts written for a particular audience, between the counter-pointed perspectives of author and critic. We do
no violence to the Folio Club collection by saying that it is about the creation and interpretation of fiction (the fact that the inset
tales themselves represent a medley of different approaches to the genre reinforces this point). The individual tales in the work can be
read, I think, as explorations of these concerns, for many repeat versions of the framework’s author-text-critic paradigm.

The opening tale, “Raising the Wind,” defines man as a diddler, a trickster who creates illusions by manipulating
appearances and his victims’ preconceptions. Such a type of the author is counter-pointed against the author as dreamer and seer
in “The Visionary,” the second tale in the collection. In both stories, these figures create or manipulate artifacts and
environments that must be interpreted, by the diddlers’ victims in the first case, by the puzzled narrator in the second. Indeed,
the opening tale can be read as a mirror image of the framework, complete with introduction, a sequence of “authors” (the
diddlers), a sampling o, their “fictions,” and a description of the responses to their creations. “Lionizing,”
the last tale in the work, features a story about the composition and reception of a treatise on Nosology and can be similarly analyzed
as a mirror image of the frame, albeit a more limited one. Equivalents of the author-text-critic pattern are also found in
“Bon-Bon” (Satan plays critic to the philosopher’s book), in “MS. Found in a Bottle” (the narrator puzzles
over a single word, “DISCOVERY,” which appears almost spontaneously from his dabblings on the sail), in “King
Pest” (the court of grotesques meets, like the Folio Club, for critical purposes, although the object of analysis is wine), and in
“Metzengerstein” (the youthful baron must interpret a picture and a set of events manipulated in some mysterious way by his
rival who signs his work with initials). The last tale on this list, I might note, repeats the paradigm within its larger structure as
well, for its narrator plays a somewhat dense critic to the materials he receives from history just as Metzengerstein performs as
interpreter of the events themselves.

As one might expect, the dearest use of this structural pattern is in “Siope — A Fable,” the tale contributed by the
little man in black, that is, probably by Poe himself. In it, the narrator hears a fable told by a Demon and obliquely describes his
reaction to it. The fable itself is about the Demon’s manipulation of a landscape “read” by the man on the rock. The
words that appear on this rock directly reflect the landscape’s changing appearance, suggesting the phenomenal world is almost
literally a page on which the Demon can write at will. We have here, I would suggest, an allegory radically extending the boundaries of
fiction. Reality itself is seen as a kind of text created, in this case [column 2:] at least, by a hidden, malevolent author. Man
can face different, progressively more instable versions of this text; he cannot, however, tolerate a reality akin to a blank page,
returning only “silence” for his efforts to seek meaning in it. It is appropriate, I think, that Poe makes this a story told
by a mocking demon and retold by a narrator; the effect is to raise the possibility that the Demon’s fable, or even the
narrator’s story about this story, may be fictive, leaving the reader faced with a text whose indeterminacy recalls the
instability if not the silence of the landscape described within the tale itself.

The concern with fictions and their interpretation is general enough in the Folio Club tales to justify seeing “Siope — A
Fable” as a central thematic statement for the work as a whole, which explores, I think, the basic analogue between world and text
in a variety of ways. This tale and ethers like “MS. Found in a Bottle” suggest that a reader’s expectation of meaning
and pattern in a text is comparable to, if not one and the same with, the mind’s thirst for signification in the phenomena of
“reality.” Poe elaborates on this thirst in “Raising the Wind,” where the diddlers’ hoaxes work because
their victims participate in creating the very illusions that entrap them, seeking out a pattern in props and events that conforms to
their expectations of what such appearances should represent. That interpretations of texts can produce versions of their messages
equally contingent upon a reader’s preconceptions is nicely illustrated by a scene in “King Pest.” Legs and Hugh see
the words “No Chalk” (that is, no credit) in a tavern “scored over the door-way by means of that very identical
mineral whose presence they purported to deny.” The writing materials obviously convey a message to the narrator unintended by the
pub keeper and logically destructive to the text. And the sailors, who cannot read, create yet another message from “a certain
twist in the formation of the letters” that warns them to flee. We have here a remarkable image of the collection’s basic
paradigm. The text is seen as a system of empty signs, filled in totally different ways when processed by the pattern-seeking
consciousnesses of the sailors and the narrator, that relates author to reader only by marking off a common boundary of their
discontinuous worlds. As an image of the literary process, it suggests something of the skepticism underlying much of Poe’s
playfulness in this collection; as an analogue for man’s epistemological relationship with his world (and its
“author”), it offers a more disturbing vision than “Slope” for the Demon’s several landscapes do manage to
communicate to the man on the rock, if the message is only the absence of message.

As a half-bantering, half-satiric intention implies, Poe began writing fiction from an ironically detached, critical perspective. A
reconstruction of his first major work of fiction suggests that Poe’s imitations of current writers and modes of the genre were
part of a larger structure which made fiction and the literary process itself into its central concerns. The shared paradigm found in
frame and tales, the juxtaposition of author and interpreter across a text. allowed Poe to explore, however comically, the basic
analogue of world and text, of epistemology and hermeneurics, that emerges when one moves this paradigm out of a strictly literary
context. Not only does this approach provide a means of establishing the internal relationships among the stories in the Folio Club
framework, but it also [page 42:] suggests a perspective on Poe’s later tales
that needs further exploration, for the author-text-critic paradigm becomes central to the structure of his mature fiction.

(2) Pollin, “Poe’s ‘Diddling’; the Source of Title and Tale,” Southern Literary Journal, 2
(1969), 106-111. Claude Richard, “Poe and the Yankee Hero: An Interpretation of ‘Diddling Considered as One of the Exact
Sciences,’” Mississippi Quarterly, 21 (1968), 93-109. Richard suggests the Philadelphia Saturday Courier first
received “Raising the Wind” with the tales Poe submitted to its 1831 contest, held the story until 1843, then returned it to
the author for revisions before publication; a recently published letter proves this hypothesis false — see note 6.

(3) For an overview of Poe’s career during this period, see Floyd Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet (Charlottesville: Univ. of
Virginia Press, 1969), pp. 18-63. For a convenient list of the printings of Poe’s early tales, see bibliographic notes to The
Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. A. H. Quinn and Edward H. O’Neill (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1958). The
author’s “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book,” forthcoming in The
University of Pennsylvania Library Chronicle, provides a detailed textual history of the collection.

(6) John W. Ostrom, “Fourth Supplement to The Letters of Poe,” American Literature, 45 (1974), 521-522, prints
Poe’s note, identifies its subject as “Raising the Wind,” and suggests the Richmond trip “probably never took
place.”

(10) Thompson, p. 48, summarizes the evidence supporting this identification in Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe’s Critical
Theory Univ. of Iowa Humanistic Studies, 2 (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1925), p. 12, and in Stephen L. Mooney,
“Poe’s Grand Design: A Study of Theme and Unity in the Tales,” Diss. Tennessee 1962, pp. 116-117. Poe may be punning
on the name “Blackwood” in Mr. Lacko’breath’s assertion that Windenough is the “originator of
. . . Lombardy-poplars,” a variety of the black poplar.

(11) This allegory thus renders dramatically the formula for journalistic “celebrity” Poe used to explain the success of
magazines like Blackwood’s to T. W. White in his well-known letter of 30 April 1835 — Letters, 1, 57-58. If
Poe had a particular Blackwood’s writer in mind for Lacko’breath, it could be William Maginn, the Irish author of the
Morgan O’Doherty satires as well as of “The Man in the Bell.” If so, then Poe’s allegory would have a roughly
factual basis, for Maginn’s work for the magazine before 1825 did much to establish its character. For a discussion of
Maginn’s and Wilson’s shaping of Blackwood’s, see Miriam M. H. Thrall, Rebellious Fraser’s: Nol
Yorke’s Magazine in the Days of Maginn, Thackery, and Carlyle (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1934).

(12) Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London:
Hogarth Press, 1971), p. 404, makes this identification. It accords with Poe’s revisions, which delete the following claims by the
narrator of “A Decided Loss”: “I had heard of Peter Schlemil [Adelbert Chamisso’s title character sells his
shadow to the devil], but I did not believe in him until now. I had heard of compacts with the devil, and would gladly have accepted his
assistance, but knew not in what manner to proceed, having studied very little [column 2:] of diablerie.” In
“Loss of Breath,” on the contrary, Lacko’breath has apparently dabbled in such matters.

(13) Imagery in Metzengerstein associates the horse with the devil; in “King Pest the First,” Hugh Tarpaulin balks at
honoring “Death,” which he subsequently describes as “drinking the health of the Devil.” William Goldhurst,
“Poe’s Multiple King Pest: A Source Study,” Tulane Studies in English, 20 (1972), 107121, explores the imagery
of hell in the latter tale.

(16) Extremely poor during this period, Poe liked to characterize himself as an American author ignored by a public indifferent to
native productionsC see “Letter to B “ (1831, 1836) in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe ( 1902; rpt., New York:
AMS Press, 1965), VI, xxxvi, and “THE FOLIO CLUB” (1833) in John C. French, “Poe and the Baltimore Saturday
Visiter,” Modern Language Notes, 33 (1918), 262

(17) Citing “Bon-Bon” and precedents for the Folio Club format in Plato’s Symposium and Goldsmith’s
Retaliation, Stephen Mooney in “Poe’s Grand Design,” pp. 22-23, 36-42, argues that one of the controlling
metaphors in the collection was probably a theme of “eating as knowing,” the “conceit that people consume each other
when they share an exchange of minds at dinner.” The mirror image of the Folio Club’s critical activities in King
Pest’s drinking society, which devotes itself to analysis, “deep research and accurate investigation” of “wines,
ales, and liqueurs,” offers strong support to Mooney’s argument.

(18) I am grateful to Professor Patrick F. Quinn for calling my attention to the curious doublings that emerge from the analysis in my
“Preliminary Notes.” “The Duc de L’Omelette,” “King Pest the First,” and
“Epimanes” are grouped together in the collection as the creations of members who admire other writers. We have here a
pattern of literary alter egos, authors who imitate similar but more famous counterparts of a different nationality: thus, Willis and
Lady Morgan, Irving and Scott, Mordecai Noah and Horace SmithC the last apparently a connection arbitrary to Poe. These formal pairings
are foreshadowed by similar doubles figuring in stories earlier in the sequence: Neal and Bentham in “Raising the Wind,”
Moore and Byron in “The Visionary,” and perhaps Maginn and Wilson in “Loss of Breath.”

(21) “Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book.” 22 Thompson, pp. 55-56, 61-67; Benjamin
F. Fisher, “Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein’: Not a Hoax,” American Literature, 42 (1971), 487494, argues
against reading even the first version of this tale satirically. His case ignores the presence of Mr. Horrible Dictu in the Folio Club
framework.

(25) Future studies of “MS. Found in a Bottle” should redefine its relationship to the Folio Club framework in light of
Hans-Joachim Lang and Benjamin Lease, “The Authorship of Symzonia, The Case for Nathaniel Ames,” New England
Quarterly, 48 (1975), 241-252, and George H. Soule, Jr., “Another Source for Poe: Trelawny’s The Adventures of a
Younger Son,” Poe Studies, 8 (1975), 35-37. Similar studies of “Epimanes” should consult Stuart and Susan
Levine, “History Myth, Fable, and Satire: Poe’s Use of Jacob Bryant,” ESQ, 21 (4th Quarter, 1975), 197-214.